In one of their Presidential
platforms, the Libertarian Party made this strong statement against
deprogrammers: "We condemn the attempts by parents or any other
--
via kidnappings, conseratorships, or instruction under confinement
--
to force children to conform to their parents' or any others'
religious views. Government harassment or obstruction of
unconventional religious groups for their beliefs or non-violent
activities must end."

Demagogue
ranting about the tyranny of capitalism

The argument that we need the
federal government to be a "safety net" is wrong. Most people think
incorrectly that the "middle" road is to have government intervene in
drastic cases but not for others. The problem is that it becomes a
slippery slope and government keeps growing. The logic is that once
we start on a road we must go all the way with it. A good book on
Libertarianism is Robert Ringer's Restoring the American
Dream. He has a great quote from Thomas Macaulay, the British
historian who predicted in 1857 what unfortunately has come true:
"The day will come when (in the United States) a multitude of people
will choose the legislature. Is it possible to doubt what sort of
legislature will be chosen? On the one side is a statesman preaching
patience, respect for rights, strict observance of public faith. On
the other is a demagogue ranting about the tyranny of capitalism and
usurers and asking why anybody should be permitted to drink champagne
and to ride in a carriage while thousands of honest people are in
want of necessaries. Which of the candidates is likely to be
preferred by a workman? ... When Society has entered on this downward
progress, either civilization or liberty must perish. Either some
Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with strong
hand, or your Republic will be as fearfully plundered and laid waste
by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire in the
fifth; with this difference, that the Huns and vandals who ravaged
the Roman Empire came from without, and that your Huns and vandals
will have been engendered within your country, by your own
institutions."

Ringer explains, as all
libertarians do, that government is everywhere. For years
anti-communists were accused and ridiculed for seeing a commie under
every rock. Feminists were blind to Communism. Today, our feminist
society, is blind to the evils of big government. Everything you
touch from the moment you get up in the morning to the time you go to
bed has been scrutinized by Big Brother. Ringer says, "The clock
radio that awakens you is subject to many manufacturing and sales
regulations. The music set off by the alarm mechanism comes from a
station that is able to broadcast only because it has been granted a
special government license it must comply with the government's idea
of 'good programming' or run the risk of having its license
revoked."

"After getting out of bed, you
wash you face and brush your teeth with government-controlled water.
The toothpaste you use has, of course, been approved by the
government." I'll
stop quoting at this point. You get the picture. He goes through an
entire day and ticks off some of the things which is just about
everything that government must approve.

Era of
collectivist thinking

Ringer explains that people can't
see clearly because all they know in the twentieth century is
statism: "Another reality of no minor consequence is that most people
living today have grown up in an era of increasingly collectivist
thinking. They understand neither the realities of collectivism nor
that there is a far superior alternative to it. Never having
experienced the freedom of the early 1900's, let alone the freedom of
our founding fathers, they have no way of realizing
--
especially in view of the well-planned nothink and doublethink
teachings of our public schools --
that what they are experiencing is not freedom."

William Simon is a former
Secretary of the Treasury and author of a libertarian book that was a
best-seller called A Time for Truth. He writes the foreward to
Ringer's book and says that America has wrongly bought the argument
that redistributing income through government force is wrong: "As Mr.
Ringer points out, this redistribution process is really an attempt
to level all people. It is coercive egalitarianism, which is the
political curse of our era. It pretends to draw its moral force from
the Constitution, which speaks of equality, but it is not the
equality of the Constitution which is being sought."

"Constitutional equality means
that every man in liberty is entitled to go as far in life as his
wit, effort and ability will take him; it is equality of opportunity.
Egalitarianism is the precise opposite. It punishes the hard-working
and ambitious and rewards those who are not; it seeks equality of
results regardless of individual differences. One of the most serious
falsehoods that is being told the American people is that our present
system represents the Constitutional vision of equality. They are
being duped."

"Restoring the American Dream
asks that we begin to reevaluate government functions on a moral
basis."

Feminists
want power

Feminists want power over men. A
prominent feminist, Catherine Mackinnon, in debate against Phyllis
Schlafly over the Equal Rights Amendment said, "To feminism, equality
means the aspiration to eradicate gender hierarchy. We stand for an
end to enforce subordination, limited options, and social
powerlessness .... Feminism seeks to empower women."

The
Art of Loving

A popular book on love is Erich
Fromm's The Art of Loving. He is correct on some points and
wrong on others. He correctly says that people think they don't have
to study how to love --
that it's something innate. He says, "Most people see the problem of
love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of
loving, of one's capacity to love .... People think that to
love is simple." He says we must learn how to love. We should
approach it as we would study "any other art, say music, painting,
carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering." Unfortunately,
Fromm is not the person to learn from. The best textbooks on how to
love are from people who really know what it is and who have
accomplished building an outstanding marriage and family. Fromm had a
bunch of lovers and wives and no children. Nevertheless, he make a
few good points. He is right when he says, "almost everything else is
considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money,
power --
almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve
these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving." Fromm
touches on the difference between men and women and that opposites
attract. But his discussion is short and lightweight. Next to Father,
the Andelins have the best books on love I've ever seen. True Parents
teach and live the true way of love and that love must be
God-centered. Fromm is an atheist and so he cannot be followed.

Where Fromm goes off the deep end
is his criticism of capitalism and love of socialism. To him people
will become loving when they live under socialism. To him, the play
Death of a Salesman sums up the emptiness of capitalism that
is based on greed and destroys the average person. Fromm is
idealistic and longs for a day when there will be an end to the
horror he sees around him. He wrote a book about what that kind of
world that would be. He called it The Sane Society as opposed
the insane one we live in. At the end of the book he wrote what is
amazingly the vision the UC has. Fromm sees all religions as
illogical and crazy but something in him (and probably from spirit
world as well) led him to write: "It is not too far-fetched to
believe that a new religion will develop within the next few hundred
years, a religion which corresponds to the development of the human
race; the most important feature of such a religion would be its
universalistic character, corresponding to the unification of mankind
which is taking place in this epoch; it would embrace the humanistic
teachings common to all great religions of the East and West; its
doctrines would not contradict the rational insight of mankind today,
and its emphasis would be on the practice of life, rather than on
doctrinal beliefs. Such a religion would create new rituals and
artistic forms of expressions, conductive to the spirit of reverence
toward life and the solidarity of man. Religion can, of course, be
invented. It will come into existence with the appearance of a new
great teacher, just as they have appeared in previous centuries when
the time was ripe." He said "unification of mankind." So many have
longed for Father, the "new great teacher" and never saw him.
Finally, he has come! And he will begin the process that will
ultimatley bring"unification of mankind"--
the dream of countless people like Erich Fromm.

Era of
big government over

In his State of the Union Address
on Jan. 23, 1996, President Clinton proclaimed, "The era of big
government is over." This is the same person that a few years before
tried to nationalize health care. Clinton started to become more
conservative because America began to mistrust big government. Along
with Marx and Stanton who wrote their goals of socialism, Charles
Kingsley also declared himself a Christian Socialist in 1848. The
social experiement of using government to solve all problems has
failed since then. I hope the trend is to go back to 1848 and have
limited government. The church is supposed to be the main
organization that solves people's
problems. Father says many times that government is object and
religion is subject. For example: "The people in government have been
beating the people in religion. The body always strikes the mind,
right? They are each other's enemy." Father has no great love for
government, but he has great love for the government of the family
and the man being the president of his family.

Democracy
is messy

One writer said, "Winston
Churchill's jest --
'Democracy is the worst form of government in the world
--
except for all the other forms' --
is no joke. It is hard to conceive of a more chaotic design for
government than one that invites absolutely everyone to participate
in fashioning it. Deference to authority sometimes seems more
comfortable than living with the responsibility of freedom ....
Democracy is not tidy. It is a rough, obstreperous, messy form of
political life. Montesquieu, that thoughtful and ingenious French
predecessor of both the French and American revolutions, observed
that where you find an orderly silence, there you will find tyranny.
Whenever we find spirited voices raised in debate, where there is
tumult and faction and unceasing talk, where men and women muddle
their way to provisional solutions for permanent problems
--
and so clumsily do for themselves what tyrants or bureaucrats might
have achieved much more neatly and efficiently for them
--
there we can feel assured that we are on the precious turf of
democracy. Because democracy is finally --
more than any other form of government --
about people, just plain people."

Culture
of Disbelief

Stephen L.
Carter is a professor of law at the Yale law school. In his book
The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize
Religious Devotion, he is right on some points and wrong on
others. Let's look first at where he has a message that everyone
should understand and then I'll tie that in with this chapter's theme
of patriarchy. He writes that America as well as the world has a
"woeful history of oppression of disfavored religious groups." He
says America should not only respect other religions but should
"celebrate" "religious pluralism." Sadly, it does not. The state is
more revered than religion. Our culture is predominately secular and
believes that "religion is something that should be believed in
privacy, not something that should be paraded." The culture "says
that anyone who believes that God can heal diseases is stupid or
fanatical" and have taken 'mystic
flight from hard truths'
and has nothing to do with the real world." Our culture, he says,
"holds not only that religious beliefs cannot serve as the basis of
policy; they cannot even be debated in the forum of public dialogue
on which a liberal politics crucially depends .... Religion is like
building model airplanes, just another hobby: something quiet,
something private, something trivial --
and not really a fit activity for intelligent, public-spirited
adults."

Our culture is hostile to
religion. He says that if you "tell a group of well-educated
professionals that you hold a political position (preferably a
controversial one, such as being against abortion or pornography)
because it is required by your understanding of God's will" everyone
will scatter and if anyone says anything they will challenge you "on
the ground that you are intent on imposing your religious beliefs on
other people. And in contemporary political and legal culture,
nothing is worse."

"That awful phrase
--
'imposing religious beliefs' --
conjures up images of the religious right, the Reverend Jerry
Falwell's Moral Majority, the Reverend Pat Robertson's presidential
campaign .... We live in a secular culture, devoted to sweet
reason. We aren't superstitious. Taking religion seriously is
something that only those wild-eyed zealots do .... The message is
that people who take their religion seriously, who rely on their
understanding of God for motive force in their public and political
personalities --
well, they're scary people."

"The message of contemporary
culture seems to be that it is perfectly all right to believe
that stuff --
we have freedom of conscience, folks can believe what they like
--
but you really ought to keep it to yourself, especially if your
beliefs are the sort that cause you to act in ways that are ... well
... a bit unorthodox. Consider our general cultural amusement each
time the Reverend Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church holds one
of his joint marriage ceremonies in which he weds thousands of
couples simultaneously --
always including some who have never met before, but were chosen for
each other by the church. In Korea in the summer of 1992, some 12,000
couples were joined. Television commentators poked eager fun .... The
idea seems to be that taking one's religion seriously is one thing,
but letting one's church control the choice of a mate
--
a life companion --
well, there a hint of irrationality creeps in. It is fine to be pious
and observant in the small things, but marriage is serious! No normal
person, evidently, would allow a religious leader to make so
important a decision; and anyone who does so is worthy of
ridicule."